Why do people willingly use BETA (if at all) quality software and complain about stuff not working ?I'm pretty sure that even Microsoft strictly advises against using their beta releases in any production environment.Would you ride a sports car with officially untested airbags and have the guts to sue the car dealer because your head punched a whole into the steering wheel ?

...cooling down...

This only complicates thing so much more. Please use software that is known to work, and that doesn't include any kind of BETA or "release candidate" products. Wait for service pack 2 ;-)

• Upload doesn't work? Do a loop-back test.• There's absolutely NO excuse for not having an ISP!• Your AVR needs a brain surgery? Use the online FUSE calculator.• My projects: RGB LED matrix, RGB LED ring, various ATtiny gadgets...• Microsoft is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is NO!

Well the fact that you can download the sketch to the Arduino (without errors is assume?) should indicate that your windows USB serial port is working ok. Sound like you haven't set your Arduino IDE's serial monitor baud rate selection to 9600 baud.

Now it's come that far. Users already expect to "work" for Microsoft to find their bugs (unpayed!). If a company charges several 100s of $ for an operating system and makes billions of $ with it, I expect it to work. Full stop. If they have to resort to using user-power to find bugs...

We at Ferrari need your help! Our engineering department has come up with a totally new airbag system. It'd be swell if you accepted our offer to switch your current airbag with our design... To further assist us in improving this product we'd also like to remove you car's breaks.

This is exactly the same misery as with flavored yogurt. Today's kids will chose the artificial stuff over the all natural variants with real fruit. Only because they don't know any better.

Once in the US ( Texas, maybe other places are different ;-) ) my roommate got sight of a commercial:

Microsoft is feeding us with junk food and "we" want to have even more.

• Upload doesn't work? Do a loop-back test.• There's absolutely NO excuse for not having an ISP!• Your AVR needs a brain surgery? Use the online FUSE calculator.• My projects: RGB LED matrix, RGB LED ring, various ATtiny gadgets...• Microsoft is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is NO!